I think that it was more text based(and obviously included vastly more overhead, being a smartphone 'app' and all); but your summary is chillingly accurate. Take the awesome power of an internet connected general purpose computer and carefully emulate a moderately obscure, insecure, and kind of noisy short range communication medium. I can't imagine why it wasn't more popular.

In a sane world, their body would have been cold ages ago; but given how big the hype for "social/mobile" is, and the chatter about "zOMG did Facebook/Google/etc. 'miss mobile???" the VCs probably figured that it was a worthwhile bet just because it had a chance of scaring one of the incumbents enough to get bought out for stupid money(not entirely implausible, given things like instagram and tumblr somehow being 'worth' a billion dollars each).

It's annoying; but a really stupid investment can be sensible if somebody even dumber is available to take it off your hands for more than you paid. In this case, it looks like that won't be happening; but I can see why somebody would be willing to make the bet(as part of a diversified portfolio, anyone who invested more than they could afford to lose in one company, especially something dumb like this, is denser than most rocks).

I suspect that their plan to move away from their core business is totally doomed; but I would also suspect that they came up with that plan because their core business was totally doomed(and they couldn't find some idiot to aquire them for silly amounts of money, maybe Yahoo was busy when the called...).

The world is pretty full of message boards and chat apps; and the combination of proximity filtering and 'anonymity' produces a really, really, low-value environment. Because of the geographic boundaries, it's useless for any of the 'connecting with other enthusiasts of my weird and potentially embarassing hobby/fetish/etc' applications of anonymity, since you can only interact with people in a fairly small area around you; but since it purports to be anonymous(obviously, an application running on your phone with location data mandatory isn't anonymous at all from the perspective of the company operating the service) it mostly attracted the...high quality comments... that people wanted to make about each other; but weren't willing to say to your face.

Shockingly, people's appetite for that appears to be limited; and the most enthusiastic users are the people most likely to drive the rest of the users away and generate enough unpleasant stories to spook potential advertisers.

It must be pretty cool to be in a position where you can commit fraud against ~2.8million people, sit on the proceeds for several years; and then settle the whole matter for 'compensation' that, at worst, might wipe out your original profits on the fraud.

Not quite as good as impunity; but perhaps an even better mockery of the perception of 'justice', since the whole process gets to play out as a pitiful farce, rather than just being ignored.

Incidentally, why is it that, given the American propensity for a good spree killing, you never hear about unpleasant things happening to the people behind schemes like this? Occasionally somebody shoots up their workplace and kills an immediate supervisor or the like; but nobody ever seems to go any higher up the food chain.

They turned all this crap on by default along with annoying auto-run apps. To say that I am unamused would be an understatement. However, I was able to fix the issue trivially by blowing away ALL of AMD's radeon junk, ripping out the radeon card, and buying a nice cheap little Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060.

"- If the federal reserve dramatically raises interest rates, the interest on the massive national debt will skyrocket. The government will meet payments by issuing more debt (how else?). This will lead to more inflation, not to the dollar "hitting the moon""

If the federal reserve dramatically raises interest rates, the interest on the existing massive national debt will not change one bit. The coupon rate on US Treasury bonds is fixed for the life of the bond and cannot be changed, not even by an act of congress.

The only thing that will change is the coupon rate on newly issued debt. The current coupon rate of newly issued short term bonds is 0.00%, and the only yield investors are realizing is that which is obtained by purchasing the bonds at a discount to face value.

Fair arguments but I think you are assuming that their means of getting around will be too much like ours. Forget space ships. Consider a plume of information laded bacteria squirted up out of the atmosphere into the path of an orbiting asteroid. They splat on to the surface, some survive and grow into a new spacegoing species.

Yeah, I was thinking more in terms of 'end user does something stupid, now somebody gets to collect the plutonium dust' type problems. I suppose that the major advantage is that people are somewhat less likely to do dumb things to electronics that they'd need to cut open their abdomens to get at.

It's really the end-user/disposal problem that makes me nervous about nuclear batteries, not the 'will the engineers screw it up?' aspect. 'Sealed sources', containing various isotopes neatly packaged as radiation sources, are even simpler to implement than nuclear batteries; and generally aren't an engineering problem; but the DoE has gone to a lot of trouble hunting down 'orphan sources' that have left responsible supervision for one reason or another; and it's hardly unheard of for those to end up in some 3rd world junkyard being crowbared open by people who have no idea what a mistake they are making.

Pacemakers have the advantage of a more or less automatic paper trail(since the diagnosis of cardiac abnormality and implantation surgery tend not to be handled in cash and off the books) and people don't tend to cut through their own bodies in order to do stupid things to their gadgets; but I'd be rather pessimistic about the possibility of sound lifecycle management for nuclear batteries in broader application.

It's too bad; because they'd be extremely useful for a variety of low power off-grid stuff; but when people can't even be bothered to separate their trash from their recyclables; it's hard to be optimistic about their safe disposal of nuclear batteries.

Umm, CNN is the reason that Millennials stayed home instead of voting for Hillary. CNN trashed Bernie throughout the entire campaign with lies and deception at the behest of the Clinton campaign. Unfortunately Millennials will believe anything they are told by "reputable" left-leaning journalism outfits like CNN.

You think I'm for Trump, and you're mistaken. Trump terrifies me, like he should terrify the legions of mouth-breathers who put him into office.

You are foolish to think that anyone who doesn't toe your particular line is necessarily against you. Your kneejerk reaction to my post, accusing me of being a Trump supporter, is ignorant, foolhardy, and outright stupid.